A nice surprise
While working at my desk and looking out the window one day this week, I noticed something new. A bright-pink flower smiling at me from a clay pot on the patio table – an unexpected development out there in my little container garden.
It had popped up overnight, a lone blossom in a pot that had been green with mystery leaves all summer, a mystery because I didn’t know what I’d planted in there. Back in May, when I put in my tomato, pepper and basil plants, I found a handful of stray seeds scattered at the bottom of a drawer among some gardening tools. There was one more clay pot and a bit of potting soil left in the bag. I filled the pot and tossed in the seeds and added some water.
And then I waited.
For gardeners, May is about patience; about wandering out there to have a peek to see what’s cooking. Most of what I plant in the spring has already been started somewhere else, and I wait for little green tomatoes and fragrant basil leaves. But starting from seeds brings a different kind of anticipation.
In May, skinny green threads climbed out of the soil, announcing the unraveling of the riddle. What had I planted? After a week, the threads thickened; after three weeks, the first leaves appeared. Mid-June, a first hypothesis.
“I think those were squash seeds,” I told my gardener friend, who grows the most bodacious basil and tomatoes in her patio garden. My leaves were wide, with a rough surface. But the seeds didn’t look like squash seeds. They were tiny and dark.
As the days passed, the plot thickened. The leaves reached out on vines that crawled past the edge of the pot. One vine attached itself to the holes in the patterned table top. What had I planted? What had I set in motion with that scattering of seeds?
In the wild, these are called volunteer plants from rogue seeds that are swept in by the wind, or dropped by birds. I see the volunteers while on the bike trail, a purple outlier in a patch of orange wildflowers.
By early this month, I got the first little cherry tomatoes, perfectly shaped and delicious but a bit hard with tough skins, maybe the result of the heat and lack of rain. Each morning I’d go out to check on things and would touch my mystery leaves. Maybe I’ll find a tiny squash some morning. Or maybe I’ve planted something that will only ever be leaves.
But then the flower appeared. This wasn’t a squash blossom; its petals were too papery. It had the shape of a hibiscus; maybe that’s what I’d planted. By that afternoon, the butterflies and bees had found the flower. They knew what it was, and they liked it.
Mr. Google might shed some light. I ran a photo through the app. The answer was definitive.
It’s a hollyhock. Can I tell you how happy I was to get that answer? Hollyhock is probably the best flower name of all. And the seeds landed in the right pot. They like full sun and not too much water. And my hollyhock is precocious, as most don’t flower the first year.
So far there’s just the one bloom, but it’s sturdy, turning its face to catch the sun, or am I imagining that? As I sit here writing this sentence, I see it out there, gathering the sun and bees and maybe a butterfly or two. How did hollyhock seeds get into that drawer? No clue. But a nice surprise.